volume 3 issue 3 article 9

Abstract: Most secondary school secretaries do management of school offices. The routine work include, arranging meeting schedules for the principal and managing school correspondences within the secondary schools. All this calls for efficiency and effectiveness in performance and to achieve so, one of the fundamental processes for almost all activities is communication. During duty performance, technologies, trainings, and appropriate communication gadgets increase the efficiency of performance of not only secondary schools staff, but achievement of school mission and plans. The objective was to establish factors that affect secondary schools secretarial staff communication ability and efficiency. The study specifically looked at how technology, school structure and channels of communication affect secretarial staff. The target population was 50 respondents and sample size of 30 secondary schools secretaries. The study used stratified random sampling and randomly picked one secretary per school by survey questionnaire. Results showed that secretarial staffs were all female, majority of them (71%) were at age between 30-55 years and (77%) of them had 6-17 years experience. Training showed that (60%) were at least college level though most of them (87%) were not trained on communication and over half (57%) of them said school needed more communication technological equipment and training for them. Communication challenges were faced by 74% with only 22% using the communication gadgets, and 80% said there were no communication policies in place. On technology, 54% have 1-3 computers in school. It was concluded that there was need to have the necessary skills and equipment for the secretarial staff to perform effectively and efficiently. It was recommended that schools buy communication technology equipment, train secretaries on them, have flexible secondary schools structure to stimulate faster flow of information and develop communication policies to guide the staff in their work.